Elena Balsiukaite-Brazdziuniene

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I AM VERY HAPPY I CAN DO THIS

Elena Balsiukaite-Brazdziuniene

B. in 1958 in Kaunas, Lithuania. MFA in painting from Vilnius Art Academy, Lithuania, in 1989. Professional painter and art educator at A. Martinaitis Art School for children and adults in Kaunas, Lithuania. Since 1989 has mounted over 30 personals exhibitions, has taken part in nearly 100 group shows.

Married to architect and painter Arvydas Bradziunas-Duse. Has raised two sons, Kazimieras and Pranciskus.

Making art is a form of life for me. It is often an unpredictable round journey from the inside out. It is the process that requires constant renewal by forgetting the moves already learned, it is the conscious choice to avoid the routine. I have always appreciated that point of instability in the art by others, which prompts a creative act, even having the minimal means of expression at one’s disposal. This is the reason that my works are very different stylistically. I am strongly inspired by extreme situations in life, and because of that I often provoke myself during the creative process: I adopt different strategies, I put aside my fears and insecurities and take risks.

In my studio I lead my real, most authentic life by engaging into a dialogue with myself and hence with the external world. The most controversial moments of the daily life acquire shapes, colours and forms in the pictures. When I am working on a picture, I am in charge of what happens in it, I control the situation. Yet at the same I am also changing myself; most likely, I do identify myself with the characters in the paintings. It is the specific inner theatre where I can try all the roles. Then comes the difficult but enormously igniting and venturesome moment: HOW? This how is resolved in the process of creating an actual picture. Here the adventure but also the trap is waiting.

Today I can reveal the reason for my works being so varied stylistically, why I cannot adopt one artistic method, contemplate it again and again. I start a picture as one person, after a while I approach the canvas as another person, add something or place accents on it against the already existing artistic logic of the painting. This is what art allows me to do: to change the trajectories, strategies, set up new rules. At the same time, it is the game including losses and torment; I both rejoice and mourn when I paint.

As F. Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “ He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” I am not afraid to complete each picture in such a way that the picture remains rooted in my timeless present time, my today.

I am very happy I can do it.

Vilijampole-Sanciai, Kaunas, LithuaniaAugust 2014

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